|
It was the fifth day
of our safari and we were trotting at a steady pace through the sparse
bushvelt, trying to cut off a herd of Elephants we had seen from the top
of a distant hill. Hurrying from behind a screen of low brush we looked
up to see the bull quartered towards us, and only fifty or so yards
distant. Carl, our PH, quickly headed us back out of sight and we ran
another hundred or so yards before stopping in breathless excitement.
“This bull”, said Carl, “is a shooter!” I quickly cocked my crossbow in
anticipation of the long awaited final stalk. Our expressions were all
smiles, but in a heartbeat it changed when Carl looked behind me and said,
“Run!” The tone of his command left no doubt as to whether he was serious
and we all scrambled through the brush following him, but after a short
distance he cut to one side, stopped, and spun around. I continued on a
few yards, then my curiosity got the better of me. I turned just in time
to see the big bull, ears flat and trunk down, charging Carl with a fast,
shuffling gate that was eating up yards at an alarming rate. As the big
Elephant crossed the twenty-yard line Carl brought his .500 A Square bolt
action to his shoulder. When the big slug hit, the bull stumbled and
turned broadside, but before he took another step Carl’s second shot drove
a six hundred-grain projectile clear through his skull and he fell like a
rag doll in a cloud of dust. I was in shock. “What the hell was that
about?” I said to Carl “The first damn bull we’ve seen worth shooting and
he attacks us without provocation!” When we walked up to the fallen
Elephant Carl showed me that by the bull’s strong smell and physical
condition the answer was obvious, he was in “musth”. In this condition a
bull Elephant is supercharged with hormones and at the peak of sexual
excitement. This makes them extremely aggressive and unpredictable, and
it was only because the bull had attacked someone who was armed that a
disaster was avoided, since we could just as easily have been unarmed
native fishermen or farmers.
I wasn’t born with a burning desire to hunt the
world’s largest terrestrial animal with a crossbow. For decades I’ve
listened to so-called experts spouting their opinions regarding crossbows
and their lack of penetration in a hunting situation. Regardless of the
physics involved and the raw logic that these indisputable facts proclaim,
opponents of the crossbow claim that the short arrows fired by crossbows
will not penetrate. In the past they have actually used this as an
argument to justify excluding the crossbow from certain seasons and
hunting opportunities in the USA. After listening to the nay-sayers long
enough I found myself with both the opportunity and means to hunt the
African Elephant with crossbow, and after years of exposure to their
“crossbows can’t penetrate” propaganda I decided it was time to make my
point.
To hunt a creature as huge and
thick-skinned as Elephant with a crossbow is a daunting task, and you must
maximize the energy and penetration that the crossbow can give you. To do
this the best solution is to use a very heavy arrow coupled with a
broadhead that creates a minimum of drag to slow the arrow’s penetration.
My choice of arrow was a double-walled Goldtip carbon shaft with extra
internal weights and a brass front insert, and for a broadhead I used a
Magnus unvented two-blade cut on contact style head with a steel broadhead
adapter. This twenty-inch package weighs around 900 grains, two and a
half times as much as my normal arrow, and out of my Excalibur Exomax
crossbow it travels 250 feet per second. This added up to a walloping
hitting power of 125 foot pounds, not much by rifle terms, but awesome for
any archery equipment. The heavy projectiles flew with deadly accuracy
from my bow, causing it to recoil like a firearm and sucked so much energy
from the limbs that the report on firing was very low.
Next big problem was
where to hunt? Without doubt the largest population of huntable elephants
in the world are in Zimbabwe. Unlike the Northern part of the Elephants
range where ivory poaching has reduced their numbers to a critical level,
large tracts of Zimbabwe are actually overpopulated. Without some sort of
population control the Elephants will literally eat themselves out of
house and home as they destroy the forests they inhabit. In these areas
there is also a huge problem with Elephants destroying the native peoples
food crops and many locals are actually killed while trying to drive off
the Elephants that are raiding their fields. One of the best Elephant
areas in Zimbabwe is a tribal area called the Omay. This region is
located on the south bank of Lake Kariba and borders the Matusadona
National Park. This is where we decided to base our hunt. Carl Mason, a
native of Zimbabwe and owner of African Trails Safaris was our PH on this
safari. Carl is an expert woodsman who can track with the best of them.
He is remarkably cool under the stress of hunting these unpredictable
giants and is nowhere in his element like he is in the thick jesse,
surrounded by tons of danger. His Elephant hunting track record stands
out among other PHs, especially where bowhunting is involved. We were to
be his seventeenth bowhunt for elephant, all of them successful. Not a
small accomplishment when you consider that these huge beasts are
unquestionably the most dangerous animals in Africa to hunt with archery.
My wife Kath and I, as well as our friend
and videographer Danny, left Canada in early April to begin our
adventure. The trip to Carl’s safari area in the Omay was long and
arduous, ending with a grueling nine-hour drive to the safari camp in the
Omay. After a day’s rest and acclimatization we were off on our hunt,
each day driving for hours in search of fresh tracks, walking miles to
check waterholes, and climbing tall hills covered with loose rocks to
glass for Elephant. We drove through many of the Omay’s tribal areas
where small encampments of natives surrounded by fields of maize, sorghum,
or cotton abounded. As we drove past the communities the people would
often run out and yell “Nyama, Nyama!” which Carl explained meant “meat,
meat!” Since in this area all meat harvested became property of the local
people they were hoping to encourage us to bring them a share of any
Elephant we killed. The ninety degree heat was tough to tolerate, but
eventually our physical condition and tolerance to the high temperatures
developed to help us deal with what was without a doubt the most
physically and emotionally demanding hunt I have ever been involved in.
Every day we awoke and ate breakfast in the predawn darkness, and traveled
for miles to glass for elephant as the sun rose. If we located any
distant gray forms moving through the trees we would march for miles to
get close enough to identify whether they were big enough to consider
harvesting. Each unsuccessful evening we would arrive back in camp
exhausted, and we would vow to get up earlier and work harder tomorrow to
make our Elephant dreams come true.
Did we see Elephant? Darned right we did, but always they were small
bulls or cows and calves. I had my hopes set on a bull of 40 pounds or
more weight per tusk, and I was willing to work for it, but I’m on the
wrong side of fifty and I generally ride a desk. As the safari wore on
the pace was telling on me. After nine days of effort, in the end it was
all too easy. We were lazing away the afternoon on the shores of
Sibilobilo Lagoon on Lake Kariba, waiting for the blistering heat of the
day to diminish so that we could once again climb and begin glassing for a
huntable bull Elephant. Moffat, our head tracker, spotted him first. A
good bull had come out across the bay and was grazing along the shore
almost a mile away. Carl and the trackers discussed the situation in
Indabele, a local native tongue, and I could only look on and surmise that
the bull was unapproachable since the bay was far too long to circumvent
before dark. There was just no way I could conceive to cross the
intervening stretch of croc and hippo infested water. I was then stunned
to see one of the trackers suddenly trot off into the jesse. Carl
explained that there was a fishing village a few kilometers distant and
that with luck we could round up a local fisherman to ferry our group
across the bay. This could work, but only if the bull would stay and feed
long enough for us to get across!
We readied ourselves while we waited. When one of the native’s tiny steel
boats rounded the distant point with paddles flashing in the sun we
started quickly for the closest point to the far shore which was out of
sight from the feeding bull. We met them in the water, and two by two
they ferried our party through the hippos to the shallows of the far side,
then we waded to shore through knee-deep water, the bottom made uneven by
the deep Elephant tracks that pockmarked it. When we were finally all on
the other side I radioed Kath, who could still see the Elephant from our
original location. “The bull”, she said, “is still there”; we were go for
final approach! As our team swung several hundred yards downwind from
the unseen bull’s location we detected the unmistakable stench of a very
rank bull Elephant. There could be no doubt that like the bull that
charged us a few days earlier, this bull was in also in musth, but we put
this disturbing thought behind us.
Now was the time to
concentrate on only one thing, successfully placing an arrow squarely into
its vitals? We quietly closed to within 20 yards of the unsuspecting
bull, which was broadside to me feeding on the lush grasses at the water’s
edge. When the big Elephant turned to slightly quarter away I said a
silent prayer and launched the heavy arrow out of my Exomax crossbow from
above him on a large rock. My biggest fear was how well the arrow would
penetrate if it centered one of the bull’s three-inch wide ribs, but luck
was with us and the shaft hit with a dull thud and slid out of sight
between them. The Bull quickly climbed the rock only a few yards
downwind as Carl backed towards us with rifle trained. We scrambled over
the rocks in preparation for a charge from five tons of
testosterone-crazed Elephant, but luckily the bull continued past us and
ran into the brush. Within a few minutes we could hear his labored
breathing behind the screen of trees, then the bull went down for good,
bellowing loudly and crushing several trees in his death throes. The
culmination of our epic hunt had gone better than any one of us could have
dared to hope for and the big Omay bull was ours!
What had
started out for me as a quest to prove the crossbow’s effectiveness has
finished as a truly life altering experience, and I was in absolute awe as
I approached the bull. Carl estimated the fallen monarch’s age at around
forty years, and the bull’s ivory, although not long, was quite heavy and
would easily surpass my 40-pound criteria. Nothing can prepare you for
the flood of emotions that wash over you when you first lay your hands on
such an enormous and awe-inspiring trophy. I was quite literally blown
away!
The “Good old days” of hunting in Africa
are right now. If you’ve ever thought about an African hunt the time to
do it is today, you’ll never feel the special excitement that Africa can
bring to your hunting experience anywhere else. If you are up for a
REALLY exciting African adventure, especially for the Big Five, Zimbabwe
should be on your short list and you can’t go wrong with Carl Mason and
African Trails ( www.Com). People have asked, “What can you hunt now to
top the Elephant Experience” and I honestly have no answer. Taking an
Elephant hasn’t in any way diminished my desire to explore and hunt with
my crossbow, but it has certainly enriched my experience and given Kath
and I precious memories that will last the rest of our lives.
Bill Trougbridge
Footnote:
The Omay is one of many areas in Africa where a fantastic new approach to
conservation has greatly benefited the local people, the wildlife, and
visiting hunters as well. That new approach is called Communal Areas
Management Program For Indigenous Resources, or CAMPFIRE. The CAMPFIRE
program puts the responsibility for controlling illegal wildlife harvest
squarely onto the shoulders of the rural communities by making that
wildlife a vital part of their economic well being. The program, simply
stated, makes the wildlife more valuable alive than dead by making the
trophy fees that are paid when an animal is harvested by a visiting hunter
the property of the local council. This money goes directly into the
community to provide them with much-needed medical and education
opportunities. Also, the meat that is taken under CAMPFIRE is distributed
to the local villages, and thousands of jobs for the local people are
created through safari operators. Campfire has been instrumental in
fostering a balance between Africa’s exploding human population and it’s
wildlife, and it’s through programs like this that Africa’s last wild
places will be preserved for future generations.
|
